SOUNDS AROUND TOWN: Camper and Cracker come to Cambridge

Wednesday

Jan 11, 2017 at 11:00 AMJan 11, 2017 at 5:29 PM

By Ed Symkus, Daily News Correspondent

You could call the gig at the Middle East Down on Jan. 14 a double header - a David Lowery double header. The singer-guitarist will be fronting both bands on the bill: the kind of eccentric Camper Van Beethoven and the bluesier, alt-rockier Cracker.

A visit to the Northeast on MLK weekend, and an appearance at the Middle East, is a tradition both bands have taken up over the past decade. But Lowery’s music-making goes back further than when he was a founding member of Camper in 1984.

“The first band I ever played in where we actually had professional gigs was Sitting Duck,” said Lowery, 56, by phone from his home in Athens, Georgia. “We were sort of a psychedelic punk ska ensemble. But I was the bass player in Sitting Duck. I had played guitar from when I was about 14, but I was never the guitarist in a band till Camper Van Beethoven.”

That was three decades ago, and Lowery still seems to get a kick out of telling about that band’s odd concept, which led to him switching to guitar.

“Camper Van Beethoven was created as a band with everybody playing an instrument they were learning,” he said. “Everybody was playing another instrument in another band, usually a more popular band. But switching to a new instrument helped develop a unique style. So we were kind of a side band. We played simple kind of wacky stuff that was different than the punk rock stuff that was popular.”

The band hit pretty early, getting initial radio play with the offbeat “Take the Skinheads Bowling” which, years later, found a new audience as part of the soundtrack for Michael Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine.”

They lasted till 1990, breaking up for reasons both personal and commercial, and Lowery, never thinking of getting away from music, but certainly interested in a new start, moved from California to Virginia. He didn’t know it at the time, but his next band, Cracker, was just around the corner.

“Things then were a little more defined back then,” he said of how bands operated. “You’d tour, then you’d come off the tour and you’d write, then make a record, and then you’d tour again. That’s the way it used to work. So when Camper broke up I just went back into the cycle: ‘OK, there’s no band now, but this is usually when I start writing songs.’ ”

That’s when the move to Virginia happened, “just to get out of California. Coming east was a good way to have a completely clean slate. When I went east, I got Johnny Hickman, who I knew from California, to come out and write songs with me, to see what we could do. So that’s how the band started. It took about a year for us to record enough songs to get a recording deal, and almost two years for things to happen.”

Lowery now admits that he thinks the change in sounds, from Camper to Cracker, caught a lot of fans off guard.

“Cracker was kind of a surprise to some people because it was more rootsy and more rock ’n’ roll [than Camper],” he said. “That first Cracker album was essentially what would now be called an alt-country album. Yeah, it had ‘Teen Angst’ on it, but the rest of it is like a blues-rock, country-rock album.”

Cracker clicked, getting more radio play and commercial success than Camper did. But somewhere down the road, Lowery, who remained friends with his former bandmates, got them back together, both on the road and in the studio. He still recalls the first time the original group played around here.

“It was upstairs at T.T. the Bear’s in 1986. It was cold and it was snowing. We played Boston on a regular basis, and we still do.”

Of course, when he says “we,” he means the annual tours with both bands. And the shows are planned with care, with set lists written out in advance.

“We know that all towns and all audiences are different, so we think about what we played last year,” he said. “So far on this year’s tour, which started in December, we’ve been playing a lot of early Camper stuff.”

He laughed and added, “We took a set list from around 1988 and started sort of riffing on that. But we play at least one thing from all the albums. And we’ve been playing a lot of first album Cracker stuff, too.”

Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker play a double bill at The Middle East Down in Cambridge on January 14 at 8 p.m. Tickets: $25; info: 617-864-3278.

Upcoming clubs and concert dates

Jan. 14:

Grammy-nominated blues guitarist Duke Robillard leads his band at The Center for Arts in Natick. (8 p.m.)